Jonathan Foreman

When I first visited Delhi little more than a decade ago it taught me to value the customs and laws and habits that are the norm in most Western cities and that are essential for urban life to be bearable.

Back in 1994, New York still had some way to go in terms of Mayor Giuliani’s civility reforms. But it was at least a place where traffic lights were more than a joke, where public monuments did not double as public latrines, where the police made most of their income from salaries rather than bribes.

Delhi on the other hand was a city whose abject third world-ness was proclaimed by, among other things, its failure to establish the elementary divide between rural and urban: scrawny cows, pigs, and feral dogs foraged in trash-filled gutters. Though it boasted scores of beautiful public buildings and graceful Lutyens bungalows, many of them were in a state of advanced decay. The streets pungently illustrated the wisdom of the old Western parental admonition: “don’t just throw your trash out the window – just imagine if everybody did that…”

As if barely controlled semi-rural chaos and environmental cluelessness weren’t bad enough, Delhi was also a showcase for the sclerotic effects of bureaucratic socialism and endemic official corruption. It groaned under the weight of mass migration from the countryside. And its failure to provide basic amenities to at least half its population illustrated the complacency of a ruling elite still puffed with post-colonial self-righteousness.

Twelve years on Delhi is, if not a new city, a remarkably transformed one. Despite a vastly greater and growing population it is in many ways more orderly, pleasant and civil.

Although it is still polluted with smoky fogs that descend when the weather cools, the air is much, cleaner than it was a decade ago. This is thanks to a court ruling that forced the Delhi Municipality to enforce long-ignored pollution laws and ban the use of diesel in public transport. All the buzzing auto-rickshaws, Ambassador taxis and packed city buses (each charmingly emblazoned with “stage carriage”) now use clean compressed natural gas.

Motorists now wear seatbelts and generally obey traffic lights at least during daylight hours. Drivers of scooters and motorbikes wear helmets (though the law requiring this does not extend to pillion passengers, and it is common to see whole families of four on a single scooter, the helmetless wife sitting sidesaddle and two bareheaded children held tightly between her and her well-protected husband.) New flyovers have eased traffic flow despite the doubling and trippling of the city’s privately owned automobiles. And a new subway system that will connect the Cities spreading suburbs to the center has opened its first stations, the project overseen by a former New York City Transit official.

Official India’s turn from socialism and protectionism has created an environment that allows advertisers for new products like cellphones, cable TV and life insurance to sponsor traffic dividers, sidewalk trees, and street furniture like bus-stops and public latrines. The ads and their mountings on fenced trees ands carefully tended traffic islands are sometimes crass but they seem a worthwhile price to pay for order and greenery.

It is true that what V.S. Naipaul brilliantly identified as India’s tragic lack of civic sense continues to plague the subcontinent, along with official corruption and a general cultural aversion to to the idea of maintenance. Yes, the relentless hooting of car horns puts Mexico City to shame. Yes the begging, public spitting, urination and even defecation take some getting used to.

But the increasingly prosperous middle classes in the city’s residential “colonies” are beginning to band together and demand the kind of efficient services – like uninterrupted electricity and water -- traditionally provided only to the elite neighborhoods where ministers and top officials have their homes. They have formed Residents Welfare Associations to put pressure on the city bureaucracies. In some cases these “RWA”s, act like New York’s BIDs organizing and paying for tasks like park maintenance and trash collection. It might be premature to say so but the emergence of the RWAs resembles in some ways the flowering of civic reformist organizations that changed the face of Victorian England.

You can see manifestations of a growing civic pride all over the place. The parks are noticeably tidier. The airport which once greeted shocked visitors to India with a riotous scrum of cabbies, porters and touts, is now a relatively orderly if charmless place. There are fewer shanty-town slums (though rather than prevent their formation, the city has an unpleasant habit of clearing these with bulldozers in the middle of the night, sometimes burying residents alive).

Some of these benign changes reflect the increasing political and cultural influence here of the South Asian diaspora (many “non-resident Indians” come back to the Mother country as investors). The growing number of Indians who have been educated in the United States, and the foreign businesspeople who have flooded in since India began to open its markets and media to the outside world, have also demanded better service public and private.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign of all is the way the Indian press, which once refused to be critical in any way of any problem in India which could not be blamed on foreigners, now covers urban blight with real gusto. Star columnists regularly inveigh against chaos and filth. And they do so in the expectation that things can get better. And the odds are that they will.

Jonathan Foreman is a journalist living in London.